As in any good business, competition in the real estate industry grows exponentially over the years. While it is true that “there will never be anyone who needs to buy a house”, it is also true that the market is pulverized among the hundreds of options available to you.
Your customers are not the way they used to be. Your sales either. Standing out, differentiating yourself, gaining ground and finding prospects who are willing to buy from you seem like challenging and stumbling tasks.
Before running off to list the “ best positioned ” billboard in the city, we recommend reading this guide.
HOW THE INTERNET CHANGED THE REAL ESTATE MARKET
The arrival of the internet represented a radical revolution in our consumer habits.
Get information, interact on social networks, guide us through traffic, listen to our favorite music … there is hardly an aspect of our life that has not been transformed by the digital revolution. Everything that matters to us is online.
So it’s time to reconsider your advertising strategies in magazines, newspapers and billboards because perhaps your potential customers are no longer there.
According to https://propertynews.pk/blue-world-city-islamabad/Annual Real Estate Report, in 2019 more than 21 million people searched for real estate deals on the internet.
Online real estate searches increased 67.29% , this only from 2015 to 2019.
Imagine that at least 5% of those 21 million searches want to find a real estate asset like yours: your company could have at least 1 million prospects interested in buying a house , apartment, office or land. And these numbers only pertain to opportunities in Mexico.
WHY DO DIGITAL MARKETING?
If your real estate development is not on the internet … it simply does not exist: not having a solid digital marketing strategy is losing new sales opportunities every day . If despite this, you still have doubts, consider the following.
Unlike offline resources, using the right tools, digital marketing allows you to calculate your Return on Investment and make informed decisions about your campaigns.
You can know the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and understand much more directly the behaviors, aspirations and expectations of your audience.
It allows you to attract qualified prospects : those who are looking for a real estate option, reducing cold calls and, above all, the time your salespeople waste when serving prospects who are not ready to make a purchase.
Sound too good to be true? Perhaps your company has begun to make digital efforts in its communication but you do not see the results you expected. You accumulate “likes”, you have many visits … but you do not perceive a real impact on the generation of leads . And it is that, (as in any good business), digital marketing has been very misunderstood.
It is not enough to have a website of your development to develop a digital strategy.
It is not (only) about maintaining your networks and circulating paid advertising on Facebook or Google Adwords.
Much less, to send mass emails to an extensive database that has never interacted with your brand.
Whats the matter, then? Web, Social Media, Email Marketing … all are excellent tactics that, in isolation, will not produce the expected result. What your digital marketing needs is strategy.
INBOUND MARKETING FOR REAL ESTATE
The Inbound Marketing is the methodology that will help you focus your strategy for marketing and sales in your market needs.
Eye. This is important: Not your brand. Not to your needs: it’s about putting the customer at the center of the shopping experience.
Why? Because the last thing a buyer wants to know is the name of your real estate project. If they can avoid it – and boy they can – your prospects are going to ignore anything that sounds like unsolicited advertising. As easy as changing the channel, or blocking the ads in your browsers:
On the other hand, never before have your prospects had access to information before making a purchase. Much more, as it is a decision as important as your next home. Before deciding on your residential lot, apartment or house, they will consult options, compare location, capital gains, price and amenities of your development with those of your competitors … and will be relentless in their conclusions.
HOW MUCH INFORMATION SHOW?
There is basic information that you cannot miss, whether you publish it on your website, digital catalogs or as entries on your blog:
- SEO Cover and Content Marketing
- Location
- Master plan
- Renders
- Amenities
- Availability
- Price range
- Development dimensions
- Dimensions and drawings of the properties.
- crane
In addition to this, all information that can give a more detailed idea of what it is like or what it will be like to live or work in your real estate development:
- Success testimonials
- Financing plans
- Work progress
- Information about the architectural firm, interior design, landscaping, etc.
- Goodwill analysis vs similar developments
HOW CAN YOU GET YOUR REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT REACH YOUR INBOUND MARKETING PROSPECTS?
Enrich their experience with valuable content and relevant information in the channels chosen by your prospects to interact with your brand.
Timely nurture the relationship, generating trust and authority, guiding them through their purchase process.
Fulfill your promise of value , helping to solve the needs of your client, even after the sale is closed to turn them into promoters of your development.
In the Inbound methodology, we name these actions attract, engage and delight. With the buyer at the center, these three actions make up the Flywheel or helm of Inbound Marketing. We are going to know them and expose some of the tactics that you can implement in each one.
There are 21 million people looking for real estate offers online, but … how are they going to find you if they don’t know the name of your development? Most likely, they are not looking for you, but:
- The safest city
- The differences between a residential lot and an investment lot
- The states with the most real estate investment in the country
- Or what is it like to live in a certain city
Attracting your prospects means capturing (and keeping) their attention with relevant content that helps solve their needs or obtain the information they are looking for. After all, it doesn’t matter that you’re the best real estate development in Mexico … if no one can find you.
HOW CAN I ATTRACT MY PROSPECTS?
Search engine optimization (SEO), roughly speaking, is about getting Google and other search engines to find you. It consists of researching the needs of your market and your own search criteria to define strategic keywords and generate a link architecture inside and outside your site.
This aims to position you in the first places of search engines (mainly Google), so that your development is among the first responses to your prospects.
SEO is a constantly changing tactic, as it responds to the updates of the sophisticated algorithms of each search engine. But regardless of the changes, one thing remains constant: Users come first. Google will privilege and position those websites that are relevant to readers. The search engine not only tracks the click to your page, but what happens after that action.
How much time do you spend on the page, how much more do you navigate within your site, is the site fast, is it mobile, do you have a lot of disruption elements?
After all … the success of search engines like Google is based on how satisfied your users are with their search results. In one sentence: your user experience.
Do you want a tip?
Write and design for humans. Optimize for search engines. After all, robots are not your customers. They are a means to reach them.
So now you know what are the keywords and topics for which your potential customers come to your development. What to do now? Write content around them. Work on the authority and domain of that issue. It’s not enough to write content – it’s about being useful.
Many times, the creation and maintenance of a blog is perceived as an idle task for CEOs or commercial directors of real estate companies. Shall we tell you a secret?
They are right.
Because it is not enough to write a blog with the best of creative spirits. Each entry should aim to solve a problem, share information or dispel the doubts of your customers.
And, of course, help you position yourself, not only in search engines, but in the top of mind of your market. Your clients have many doubts to clarify before deciding to sign the deeds of a house.
How can you help them? A blog is an excellent tool to complement and deepen the information on your website and share the lifestyle and investment advantages that your real estate will offer to its residents.
They allow you to monitor your competition and generate tactics to differentiate yourself from your potential customers.
Allow your clients to evaluate your development and share their opinion about it. (Yes: this is a double-edged sword. A happy customer on Facebook is gold. An angry customer …)
Through paid advertising, they allow you to reach prospects with market segmentation.
They allow you to interact with your prospects in a fun and fast way.
They are one of the main channels for disseminating your content.
Tip: Put yourself in your client’s shoes. What are you looking for on social media when prospecting for real estate?
On the one hand, concrete information about the development. Square meters, location, financing plans. But also an immersion in the lifestyle that you will enjoy if you become a resident. Find your gold clients and encourage them to share their experience. Let them be the ones to become the promoters of your real estate.
To hook
You have managed to attract visitors to your site, readers to your blog and fans to your Facebook page … what happens now? They are useless if you don’t offer them options to interact within your digital channels.
Engaging, in the Inbound methodology, means tracing the routes for your prospects to carry out desired actions in a way previously designed by you. Actions that, of course, include the purchase of a house or apartment, but are not limited to the purchase.
The more a prospect interacts with your brand, the closer they are to becoming a sales opportunity. The longer he continues to interact with you after making the purchase, the closer he will be to recommending your development to friends, family, and even strangers.
HOW DO WE MAKE A PROSPECTUS ATTACHED TO YOUR REAL ESTATE?
Again: putting it at the center of the shopping experience. Buying a property is a daunting task. Make it easier! damage
Watch out. It’s not about quantity, it’s about relevance. Define the topics and keywords for which you want to be recognized and become THE BEST source of content around it.
> Social Media
Do you want your prospects to buy your houses? Make them feel at home. Social networks are an excellent opportunity to open the doors of your development to visitors who are beginning to prospect real estate. In recent years, they have become the favorite interaction channel for millions of users. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn … how can they help you attract your customers?
Think Contextual Marketing: automate and personalize your content according to motivation, geographic location and degree of interaction that the user has with your brand.
Place buttons on your website to make it easier for your visitors to find the information they are looking for.
Place calls to action on your social networks so that it is easy to make a phone call or send you a message if required.
It offers contact forms to obtain the basic information that allows you to continue in communication with them.
Give them exclusive content that helps them learn a little more about your development in exchange for their contact information.
Channel the information of the purchase opportunities to your sellers.
Contact your prospects only if they are ready to make the purchase or to offer them the information they previously requested.
New call-to-action
Here are some of the tactics that can help you hook your prospects:
Landing pages and forms
These tools aim to obtain the contact information of your prospects, in order to nurture their process or, to connect them with a seller to close the sale.
No matter how close or far your prospect is from closing, if you want something as valuable as their contact information, you need to offer them something equally valued in return. This could be a content offer, a real estate consultancy call, or a timely contact with a sales representative.
Email Marketing
Keep in mind that not everyone who shares their data with you is ready to buy real estate. What to do with these contacts? It is very tempting to channel them to sales people, but think that the time you waste your sales force in calling a person who is not interested in the purchase is simply throwing your money in the trash.
Email Marketing is a fundamental tool to nurture those contacts. Make them remember your development by sending them timely information according to the interests that they have previously shown with their interaction.
Do you have a new financing plan? Do you have only 5 apartments left, and you want to speed up the sale? Are you organizing a showoff or the opening of a point of sale? Let your contacts be the first to know. A timely email can make the difference between a lost sale and a closing.
Marketing and sales automation
How long does it take to manually capture your leads? Now imagine that you can spend that time making calls and following up with those prospects. No matter how efficient your marketing and sales teams are, it will be humanly impossible to give a personalized follow-up to each.
Automation tools such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) allow you to keep an organized follow-up of all your prospects and to replicate, standardize and scale your marketing and sales processes. What does it translate into? On happy residents and customers who recommend you.
Start aligning your marketing and sales with this free guide
Contact rating
How many times have you had a phone conversation with a prospect who was obviously never going to buy from you? Locating what actions your prospects should take and assigning them a specific rating will allow you to better choose who to call.
Do you have a prospect who has checked your pricing page more than once? You are probably facing a good sales opportunity.
On the other hand, a visitor who has only walked through your site to read articles on your blog is still far from making the decision … or it may be your competition.
Delight
What does it mean to close a sale? For a successful real estate project, it is not just about adding to your client base. It is an open door to many opportunities.
Your future residents are thinking of inhabiting an ideal space for their families … and they will do their best to surround themselves with the best neighbors. A happy client will recommend your development to their loved ones to share the quality of life they enjoy. Over time, if you work on that relationship, your residents will become your best sales force.
In the Inbound methodology, all the actions you take to boost customer satisfaction are called delight. In a real estate project, after-sales activities can be translated into:
Quality surveys
How did your salespeople serve your new customers? Have them evaluate and help improve your services.
Work progress
Not all developments are finished work and a project under construction must work twice as hard to generate trust among its clients: keep your work progress updated and communicate it to the owners by email, social networks and on your website.
Share the information clearly and honestly. If an owner expects delivery by a certain date, they will want to be aware of any delays, no matter how small, and will appreciate being informed on time.
Courtesy calls
Do not become a stranger to your clients. Whether you are a real estate agent or a developer: your job radically changes people’s lives, giving them a space where they will spend a large part of their lives. Offer them a courtesy call to make sure all is well with their new property. If there is something you can help to increase their well-being, do not hesitate to offer your services.
Did your residents just move to the city? Make your real estate your best ally. Sending a catalog with hospitals, schools, supermarkets and other services is a courtesy that will be permanently appreciated.
New releases
Give privilege to those who already trust you, before launching a new development for sale. Buying second and third properties is a very common practice among residents of a successful real estate development.
Attract, engage and delight. Before sending an email, posting a photo on social media, or picking up the phone, ask yourself: Is this action going to attract, hook, or delight my clients and prospects? If the answer is positive … Go ahead! Now you can recognize these three actions and identify what tactics to implement in each of them … but when should you do them? Let’s talk a little about the life cycle of your real estate project!
MARKETING FOR EACH STAGE OF YOUR REAL ESTATE PROJECT
No matter how ambitious, a residential, corporate or investment development is finite: it has a specific number of properties to sell. But when your last residential lot is sold, if your marketing efforts have been successful they will become the foundation for your next construction. Our experience in the real estate sector has allowed us to identify the different stages your marketing goes through, responding to sales strategies.
Friends & Family
It is about communicating this real estate opportunity through a private event to your most loyal clients. Among them you can find family and friends close to you and your team . Although this stage is traditionally carried out “personally” and by word of mouth to a select group of buyers, the truth is that a digital marketing strategy can make this process much more efficient:
Segment in your database the contacts considered as “Friends & Family”.
Send digital invitations with forms to confirm attendance at the event. Include the most attractive and relevant information about your development.
Follow up on confirmed guests with automated emails to increase buzz and offer project previews.
After the event, you can follow up by email, segmenting who attended and did not attend. Do not miss the opportunity to promote this sale among those who, for some reason, did not make it to the appointment.
Presale
The presale is fundamental to the business strategy of most real estate projects. During this stage it is likely that you still do not have plans, measurements or development design, but you have an invaluable asset: your portfolio of loyal customers. Those who are willing to buy you almost blindly because they trust your brand and the investment opportunity you present to them.
This stage lasts a couple of months, but it encompasses all the actions of the Inbound methodology:
DELIGHT
In fact, we can consider that the presale to friends and family is in itself a delight strategy. Send an email to your database to announce the next release. Make calls to strategic clients and present them with the information you currently have.
ATTRACT
Despite not having plans or measurements, you can share your projections and previous success stories to this select list of contacts. This will make your project even more attractive.
Keep in mind the tactics we mentioned above to track the buyback of your current customers. Don’t let an opportunity be lost due to mismanagement or a late call.
Launching
Those who bought you in the presale become true investors in your project. With the capital you generated, you are ready to launch your real estate project.
The launch stage is the most intense in a real estate marketing strategy. When talking about new prospects, the first impression is what counts. Before you focus on attracting, engaging, and delighting:
DEFINE THE PERSONALITY OF YOUR DEVELOPMENT
It is not only a logo: the identity of your development is the face you reveal to your prospects. What are the values of your real estate project? What lifestyle does it promote? What color palette, voice and tone do you represent?
DEFINE YOUR BUYER PROFILES
What kind of people do you want to attract? What characteristics and behaviors define them? What are your motivations when buying a property? Buyer profiles are the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy and they deserve us to talk much more about them. However, you can learn a little about that concept here.
ENABLE YOUR DIGITAL CHANNELS
Website, social channels, business accounts. Don’t let any of them go unnoticed . A paid advertising plan on social media or Google Ads will boost your development in the early stages of its life.
This is a long and sustained stage over time. During it, you should think about medium-term strategies and, above all, give a timely follow-up to each of your prospects.
During the sale of a development, you must optimize your first marketing hypotheses.
FINE-TUNE AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION ON SOCIAL MEDIA
After a couple of months, your digital marketing strategy should allow you to get to know your prospects a little more. What characteristics do your qualified leads share? Go back to targeting your paid advertising and fine-tune it with your discoveries.
FIND NEW SEARCH REASONS AND KEYWORDS
What terms are your prospects meeting you on? Research which keywords have been successful and rework your content around them.
OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT
Surely you have published a blogpost that helped you attract and hook your prospects. What information did you share? How can you spread this same information in other formats?
Video marketing is an excellent opportunity to circulate your content in an attractive and accessible way for your audience.
YOUR MARKETING AND SALES PROCESS
During the time it takes for your development to sell, your marketing and sales departments will share valuable information to improve their processes. Marketing will give sales new market opportunities and share the feedback that your prospects give through social media or other channels. Sales will share with marketing which of the digitally generated leads meet the closing characteristics and give you feedback on the scope of your work.
Reinforcement
You sold 80% of your development, but you feel that selling that remaining 20% is being twice as difficult. On the other hand, you think that it is not worth continuing your marketing efforts with as much intensity as in the previous stage. If selling those last few apartments is giving you headaches, you’ve reached the reinforcement stage.
This moment of your sales does not have to become a desert plain. There is still a lot to do in your digital marketing strategy.
ATTRACT
To new audiences with an unprecedented offer. You can design a financing plan that appeals to new prospects, or focus your digital marketing in other cities or regions.
TO HOOK
To prospects that you considered a ” lost sale.” It is very likely that their objections have been cleared, or that they are waiting for a “good agreement”, to decide to buy.
DELIGHT
Again: those who have already bought you will want to buy from you again. Offer your customers select special purchase conditions. You can also design a referral system to encourage your residents to recommend your development.
Tracing
Did you sell all your apartments? Did the offices begin to be rented? Isn’t there a single residential lot in your gated community? Excellent! But don’t make the mistake of closing your digital marketing strategy. Continue communicating relevant news about your project to visitors and residents.
Post on social media. Advances, inaugurations, new launches. Turn the social networks of your development into the favorite communication channel of its residents.
Update your website. Post new events and redirect visitors to your future developments.
The circle begins again. In each new real estate development, your audience is empowered, and the tactics to attract, engage and delight will become more and more successful.
YOUR CUSTOMERS FIRST
START TODAY
Your future residents should be the linchpin of everything you do. From the design of the development to the follow-up calls to the sale. This change in the way you do business permeates the very culture of your company. This is the real change that the digital revolution brought to our lives. In a world where you can access information in less than a microsecond, our consumers have become more suspicious and demanding than ever.
If, more than selling a house, you care about offering a unique lifestyle and increasing the well-being of your clients, you have come a long way. This guide will become a map to communicate to the world the vision behind your real estate development.
